Regulatory Focus, Perceives Costs, and Confidence Thresholds as Predictors of Classroom Participation

• In Event: Using the Concept of Perceived Cost to Bridge Cognitive and Motivational Theories of Student Learning

Abstract

Purpose and Framework: Recent studies have shown that students’ active participation in the classroom (as indicated by their hand-raising behavior) positively predicts their cognitive engagement and academic achievement (Böheim et al., 2020, 2023). It has been suggested that students are more likely to participate when they are confident in their abilities (e.g., Böheim et al., 2020; Galyon et al., 2012). However, support for this association is mixed, with at least one study showing a nonlinear relation between self-efficacy and participation (Galyon et al., 2012). This suggests that students do not weigh confidence on its own when deciding whether to participate – instead, they compare it to an internal threshold and assess whether they are sufficiently confident about their knowledge, given the risks of participating (e.g., answering incorrectly and looking foolish). The idea that individuals rely on confidence thresholds when forming decisions is consistent with research from the metacognition literature (e.g., Lee et al., 2023).
In a recent series of unpublished studies (Authors, 2022), we demonstrated that college students’ confidence thresholds for participating in their math and social science classes robustly predicted their self-reported participation. In addition, these thresholds were associated with differences in students’ regulatory focus, such that students with a prevention focus in a particular domain (i.e., a focus on safety/security) set higher confidence thresholds and participated less than students with a promotion focus (i.e. a focus on growth/advancement). However, we did not investigate the role that perceived costs play in this phenomenon. For this presentation, we will examine whether costs partly mediate the association between regulatory focus and confidence thresholds. That is, are prevention-focused students particularly sensitive to the costs associated with academic behaviors, and do they weigh them heavily when determining how confident they need to be to engage in such behaviors?

Method: The final sample included 161 college students who were enrolled in at least one math course and one social science course (see Table 1 for demographics). The participants completed each questionnaire measure in the online survey twice: once for a math class they identified and once for a social science course. Here we focus on the following subset of measures from the larger study: academic regulatory focus, perceived costs, confidence thresholds, and classroom participation. We also included the following variables as covariates: confidence and value (assessed at both domain and participation-specific levels) and opportunities for participation (see Table 2 for a list of items and descriptive statistics).

Results and Significance: To examine our research question, we conducted path analyses with maximum likelihood estimation and bootstrapped standard errors (see Figures 1a, 1b). For both the math and social science domains, we found a significant indirect effect of regulatory focus on classroom participation via perceived costs and confidence thresholds. From the perspective of expectancy-value theory (Eccles & Wigfield, 2020), these results suggest that the impact of perceived costs may not be limited to how students’ value certain behaviors/activities. In addition, costs may determine how much confidence students require when deciding whether a behavior is worth engaging in.

Authors

• David B. Miele, Boston College

• Meghan Coughlan, Boston College

• Marina Vasilyeva, Boston College

• RoseMarie Rohrs, Boston College